Corpos em transe: a cidade do Salvador nas fotografias de Pierre Verger (1946-1952).

Abstract

The daily life of the city and ordinary people has long remained veiled to a cursed zone, with its stories dragged under the carpet and contempt for its ways of acting, thinking and living. In this sense, this text proposes to talk about the impertinence of the excluded, the presence of elements considered undesirable, the foreign body, 'ugly, dirty and evil' occupying the spaces of city life. The background of the plot will be the alleys and alleys of the city of Salvador, a delight for musicians, poets, writers and cause of disturbance for doctors, engineers, urban planners, managers and the literate elite, holders of the civilizing project. In the scene, several conflicts of possibilities of the urban living were identified, a game of dispute between speeches, images and projects that would legitimize itself. Thus, the central objective is to understand through body experiences photographed by Pierre Verger, the everyday world of body practices in the city of Salvador from 1946 to 1952. The photographs produced by the French photographer in 1946 to 1952 were organized and published in the book Portraits of Bahia (1989), in this way, they entered the scene, as opposed to the documentary set of scarification instruments, as an interpretative possibility of unraveling the daily plots of the unprecedented bodies in the city, thinking how these trancelike bodies reneged on society impacted by control and creating moments of mobility amid the chaos provided by urban interventions.